


an eternal recurrence of bad decisions (and one good one)

by NightsMistress



Category: Young Avengers
Genre: Background Billy/Teddy, M/M, no infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 22:41:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time that Nate tries to save Cassie’s life, he appears in the timeline approximately a month after her death, in Billy Kaplan’s living room.  In retrospect, Nate thinks that this should have been a sign.</p><p>Post Children's Crusade, incorporates material from Young Avengers v2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an eternal recurrence of bad decisions (and one good one)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Altheak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Altheak/gifts).



> Thank you to xandertheundead and caterpills for betaing this one, and thank you to AltheaK for your patience in waiting for this pinch hit to go up. 
> 
>  
> 
> [Play the fanmix](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXW3yGJFlVGx3DBv0tFx2-s1XMeN9vxCB)

The first time that Nate tries to save Cassie’s life, he appears in the timeline approximately a month after her death, in Billy Kaplan’s living room. It’s the first time that he has been to Billy’s house on account of them having secret identities the first time he was in this time point, so he looks around at the upper middle class decor with some interest. It was the first time he had seen it outside of a museum, after all.

Billy doesn’t react to Nate’s open interest in the furnishings, or indeed to Nate’s appearance at all. Initially Nate isn’t that distressed about that, as less said about the last time he was here the better, but after a few minutes he had expected Billy to say something. _Anything_. Instead, Billy remains staring out the window as if the street is more interesting than the appearance of someone from a thousand years into the future.

“So … hi,” Nate says after an awkward minute. “This definitely looks bad, but it’s not. Purely non-evil visit.”

There’s still no reaction from Billy. Nate takes this opportunity to study Billy more openly. The last time he had seen the Young Avengers he had wanted them to hurt like he was hurting, so that they’d understand why he had done the things he did. This, however, was not what he had hoped for. He had wanted Billy to be angry, not crumpled.

“Is anyone else here?” Nate says, more to fill in the silence than anything else. He’s not sure what would happen if someone else had been there, given the circumstances of his last appearance in twenty-first century New York.

“No,” Billy says at last, his voice a rusty croak. “It’s just me.”

“Oh,” Nate says. After a moment he adds, “Are you okay?”

Billy stares at him like he is speaking in a foreign language, before turning away and returning to gazing out the window. Nate thinks he should be annoyed, but the whole situation is just too strange, that he isn’t. He does wish that there was a manual to explain what he is meant to do.

“I’ll just be going then,” Nate says after another long minute. “I don’t want to be here when your parents get home.”

“Okay,” Billy says finally. Nate isn’t sure if Billy heard him at all, and it’s that that makes Nate decide that he should leave right now. He is fairly sure that he is the cause of this, and that the only way he can fix this, and make it right, is to save Cassie. He owes it to Billy, after all. He did save his life.

In retrospect, the fact that Nate wants to save Cassie to save Billy should have been something of a clue.

*

The next time Nate tries to access their timeline, he ends up appearing two years before Cassie was born.

He watches over the Langs, wondering whether he should tell them about Cassie’s future. 

He decides against it. Knowledge of his own future has done little to help him out, so he doubts that the Langs would find it helpful to know what is to come for their daughter who has yet to be born. Further, it is extremely unlikely that they would believe it. It simply wouldn’t be worth his time. The only time in Cassie’s life that Nate is concerned with intervening with at the moment is her death.

Later, he wonders whether that was truly a wise decision.

*

The next time is ten years after she dies, and Billy Kaplan, Sorcerer Supreme, tells him why it is that Nate simply isn’t able to enter the time point just before she died.

“I sealed it off,” Billy says. Nate stares for a moment, as this was something that he had never conceived of. Then he can feel his guts roil in response to his unfurling anger at the high-handedness that means that Billy thinks this kind of response is acceptable. He takes a breath to try and calm himself, to allow himself time to come up with a persuasive argument that would convince this Billy of the error of his ways.

He can’t.

“Why?!” Nate explodes, his hands balling to fists by his sides. The old Billy would have taken a step back at this and hunched his shoulders to poorly shield himself from the blow. The adult Billy just raises an eyebrow and otherwise looks unimpressed. This does little to improve Nate’s mood, as he dislikes being treated like a particularly selfish child throwing a temper tantrum.

“Because,” Billy says, reasonably. “I knew you’d try and stop it.”

“Of course I would!” Nate says. “I can save her!”

“I won’t let you,” Billy says. Somehow he is completely expressionless in the face of Nate’s stormy mood, which just makes it worse. It’s Cassie’s death, Billy should care as much as Nate does about undoing it, about proving that it shouldn’t have happened. “Cassie deserves to rest in peace.”

“She deserves to not be _dead_ ,” Nate snaps, swiping away Billy’s argument with a wave of an armored hand. 

“Everyone dies,” Billy says. “Who are you to decide when that should happen?”

“You can’t tell me you wouldn’t do it if you could,” Nate says. 

At this, Billy winces, the first real, open emotion that he has demonstrated during this conversation. It’s only now that Nate can see that he wasn’t emotionally disengaged, but instead so coldly angry that his face was neutral. Nate remembers now that Billy always ran cold when his temper was up as opposed to when he was aggravated or frustrated. “I can tell you that I know the consequences of doing this kind of thing, and of listening to impulses better left ignored. I learned that the dead need to stay dead. I don’t want you to make the mistakes I did.”

“I _won’t_ ,” Nate says, setting his jaw. “I’ll be better. I won’t make a mistake.”

“No, you will,” Billy says. “That’s why I won’t let you hurt her. Let it go.”

Nate won’t. Not ever. To let it go, to let _Cassie_ go, is to be responsible for her death. He won’t be responsible for it, because it is the first death that will lead to Kang. He knows this. It has to be true. And so to not be Kang, he must undo her death.

“Don’t try and stop me,” Nate says.

“I already have,” Billy says. “Listen to me. It’s not about her now, is it? It’s about you.”

“That’s not true,” he says, cold and quiet and very angry. “I’m trying to _save_ her.”

“You can’t lie to yourself forever,” Billy says. “Don’t come back to this time again.”

Nate bites back the immature retort of _I wouldn’t want to_ , and storms out of that timeline. He tries to return to it immediately afterward, to prove to Billy that he can’t tell him what he can and can’t do, but he can’t. That moment in time is also sealed away from him, and Nate vibrates with anger. How _dare_ Billy Kaplan do that? If it wasn’t for Nate finding him, he would never have been the Sorcerer Supreme. He’d just be some bullied kid in some New York school, dreaming of being an Avenger one day. Nate gave him _purpose_ , and now he uses that gift to punish him. It’s just not _fair_ , and with that thought Nate looks for another version of Kang to kick into compliance.

*

One of the occupational hazards of being a time traveler is that you learn to recognise who the other time travelers are and what period they are from, or else you’re stuck having some terribly awkward conversations with people who either know how the conversation turns out and are dreadfully bored, or who missed the first half and think you’re very strange. Fortunately, Nate has a good memory for these things, and a knack for pattern recognition.

Therefore, when a new energy signature starts groping its way across the space-time continuum, Nate takes notice. He takes especial notice when he realizes that it is not a new energy signature at all, but instead one that he is intimately familiar with. He watches, breath caught in his throat, as his suit tracks Billy’s progress across the dimensions. The way that Billy searches the timelines is nearly entirely chaotic, which makes sense given the source of Billy’s powers, and Nate has no idea how he manages to process it. He stops at one time point, and pulls something out.

It’s Cassie, Nate tells himself. It has to be Cassie. There’s no other person it could be but Cassie. Finally, Billy had seen the truth in what Nate had said, and had pulled a Cassie out before she died.

However, the time point is odd, as it’s before their Cassie died. It would make more sense to pull Cassie out from the moment before her own death, and the closer the universe is to theirs, the better. Nate tries to insert himself into the timeline. He’s not able to completely, but he’s able to recognise that it is not Cassie’s death. It is instead a moment before Teddy’s mother’s death.

“It should have been _Cassie_ ,” Nate says to the Billy of that world, staring in shock at Mrs Altman’s death. Billy can’t hear him, which is why Nate has no qualms of telling him exactly what he thinks about his alternate’s choices. It’s childish, and he knows that it is, but he thinks he’s entitled to a fit of temper, especially when his so-called friends make the wrong choices to spite him. 

When his temper cools, however, Nate decides that it was for the best that Billy demonstrate that he could extract people from alternate dimensions. After all, he was the one that sealed off Cassie’s timeline from Nate. The very least he could do, or at least a Billy could do, was find a way to sneak in under that seal and pull her back out again. There’ll be one that can help him, one that knows Nate and knows that what he wants to do is good. 

There’ll be a Billy out there who will help save Nate from what he will become.

*

The next timeline Nate enters, Billy is fifteen years old, gawky from a growth spurt and with a black eye blossoming over his left eye and cheek. That’s not unsurprising. One of the things that Nate realized when forming the Young Avengers was that the four of them had some reason to be dissatisfied at the way the world was. Billy’s anger, though he kept it under lock and key for the most part, was that his peers refused to accept him as he was, and he refused to change even under the threat of violence. It was what first drew Nate to Billy; they both refused to change who they were.

What is surprising is the wreckage that Billy is standing in. With the exception of the immediate epicenter around Billy, which is completely intact, the rest of what looks to be a school is utterly destroyed. There aren’t any life signs, but Nate’s scanners aren’t picking up any corpses either. He’s sure he would be able to see them on visuals too, as there is nothing left of the school buildings larger than a fist.

Nate brings up a map. Apparently this used to be Billy’s school. Given that it’s just past twelve on a school day, the complete absence of any other person in the immediate area is very disquieting. Nate wishes he had a class list so that he could find out if Billy had simply teleported them elsewhere while magically nuking his school or had done something else. He’s going to assume that it was a simple teleportation: in New York that kind of thing happens often enough that it doesn’t make the history books. 

“Oh God,” Billy gasps, eyes wild and very blue. “Oh God, oh God, _oh God_.” The sparks from his hands and eyes pulse in time with his breathing, creating a magical strobe light that cuts right Nate’s armor to where Nate assumes that, if souls exist, his must reside. The battering of chaos energy is thoroughly unpleasant until he manages to get his armour to adjust to it, and even then he can still feel it. It just doesn’t hurt anymore.

Billy still hasn’t reacted to the appearance of a hovering mini Iron Man, instead trembling with full-length body shudders.

“It’s okay,” Nate says soothingly, lifting his helmet. “I’m from the future, and I’m here to help.”

Billy turns towards him like a poorly controlled puppet, the light guttering like a dying candle. “What?”

“It’s okay,” Nate says, theorizing that if it worked once it might work again. “You have magical powers. What you want to happen comes true, if you want it enough.” He reaches out a hand. “Come with me, and I’ll help you learn to control it.”

“Control it?” Billy says, his voice high and sharp with hysteria. He shakes his head rapidly, as if to dislodge an invasive thought from his brain. “ _Control it_? I want it gone!”

“Billy,” Nate says carefully, putting his hands up to try and placate him. That is a mistake.

“How do you know my name?”

“I’m from the future,” Nate says, but Billy cuts right over the top of him.

“I can’t - I can’t - _I want_ —”

“No, you don’t,” Nate says quickly, hearing the way that Billy’s voice _shifts_ from his speaking voice to when he’s casting. 

“ _I want this to never happen_.”

There is a large magical bubble, spreading outwards, and Nate only just manages to pull out of the timeline before it touches him. He takes a moment to catch his breath and to let his hands stop shaking. He hadn’t noticed it until now, but Billy hadn’t been the only one shaking. The Billy in his timeline had only shocked a classmate. Nate wondered what had triggered this timeline’s Billy’s powers, and what exactly he had been so afraid of.

After recovering his equilibrium, he inserts himself ten minutes earlier, to try and stop Billy from doing whatever it is that he does. 

There is no Billy. 

His suit updates. 

There has never been a Billy Kaplan in this timeline.

“Oh,” Nate says as the implications hit him. “I didn’t know he could do that.”

It bodes well for Nate’s own mission though. If an entirely untrained Billy Kaplan, who has no concept of what he could do if he set his mind to it, could override the Scarlet Witch’s spell and wish himself out of existence then a Billy Kaplan who knows what he is and has a reason to bring Cassie back would be perfect.

*

He goes back to his Billy for reasons he’s not sure he understands. It’s not as if this Billy can help him, or at least could help him yet. Instead of emerging into the timeline, Nate watches as Billy prepares breakfast in his family’s kitchen. He smiles at Billy’s messy bed hair and the way that the pajama bottoms just barely hang onto his hips, and how Billy always looks the most interesting when he’s sleepy and dishevelled.

Billy looks better than he did the last time that Nate saw him. He’s put on the weight he lost, most of it muscle, and it looks good on him. It’s probably Teddy’s influence; while Teddy can shapeshift muscle, that doesn’t lend him the coordination to _use_ it. A lot of the training that they had done with Teddy was him learning how to apply the muscles he created in the most effective way. Nate hadn’t tried teaching Billy how to fight, because he assumed that Billy was too fragile for it.

Apparently, by the wiry muscles along Billy’s arms and shoulders as he reached up to the top shelf of the pantry to fetch down cereal, Teddy didn’t agree and nor did Billy.

“Morning,” Billy says as Teddy enters into view, still rumpled from sleep.

“Morning,” Teddy says with a smile, and Nate’s stomach twists. He wants this. It’s not fair that he can’t have this. If it wasn’t for Doom he _could_ have this. 

He leaves before he is unable to stop himself entering the timeline and demanding of Billy that he help. He’ll find a Billy that will help him. He _will_. And then he could have moments like this as well.

*

The next world Billy is a girl, which is odd, and a speedster, which is even stranger. She’s built like a dancer, all graceful lines and long lean muscle, and Nate tells himself that it’s only natural that he’d be attracted to her. She’s all the things that he likes about Billy, and whenever she smiles at him with that wry, self-deprecating smile while talking about what Nat had done for her to stabilize her powers, Nate can’t help but think of his Billy.

She’s funny, and smart, and it’s only natural that Nate would think about what it would be like to kiss her. She’s all the things that Nate likes about Billy, but in a girl-package.

Or at least that’s what he tells himself.

He knows he’s lying.

Instead, he asks her about whether she has a twin sister, one with magic. 

“That’s weirdly specific,” she says.

“Trust me,” Nate says.

“I do,” she says with an artless ease that Nate desperately misses from Billy. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about. I know the X-Men found a magic user the other day, someone named Christina?” She hums for a moment then stops, her finger raised in the air as she points at Nate. “Christina Shepherd. That’s her name. It was on the news; she blew up her school with magic.”

It’s too much of a coincidence, but Nate doesn’t go looking for Tina Shepherd. It’s not simply the magic he needs, it’s the magic and Billy. Billy is essential to his success, even though he doesn’t understand why, or how.

“Thanks for the help,” he says with a smile. 

“Sorry I couldn’t help more,” Willa says. “If you see Nat around … tell her we’re doing okay here. We miss her.”

“What happened?” Nate asks in spite of himself, and Willa laughs.

“I thought you’d ask that _first_. Kang showed up and she’s leading him on a chase through the timeline. Figures that Kang’s a guy, huh? Thea’s with him.”

“Oh,” Nate says.

“I wanted to go with her,” Willa goes on. “But dad said I had to stay because you would be coming and I had to pass a message on. Dads, huh? Even when they’re doing that freaky Sorcerer Supreme thing they still make you do their chores for them. You know?”

“Not really,” Nate says with a wry smile. “But what’s the message?”

“Well,” Willa says. “Dad said you were coming and that you keep looking in the wrong places. Whatever _that_ means. Also you need an umbrella.”

“Is he always that helpful?” Nate says. It slips out in spite of himself; he knows better than to insult the Sorcerer Supreme, no matter what alternate world he’s on.

“Sometimes he’s worse,” Willa says. “Power and vision and all that. But I’d get the umbrella.”

“I will,” Nate says. “Tell Mr Maximoff I said thanks.”

*

Nate heads back to Billy’s timeline and buys an umbrella.

“Why do I keep coming back here?” he wonders aloud on the street. Fortunately, New York residents are entirely used to people talking to themselves and so don’t give Nate a second look.

It’s a question that plagues him over the next few weeks, as he dives in and out of timelines to fight himself. Why Billy? Why this particular Billy? He’s powerful, it’s true, but there are other reality warpers out there, most without the particular complicated history that Nate has with Billy.

It’s a question that sticks in his mind as he returns to his search: what’s so important about Billy Kaplan?

*

He finds his answer at last, in a world on the cusp of change during a moment that never existed.

Nate stumbles out from his time travel machine into a world that seems barely able to support life. His sensors tell him that the air is full of ash and magic, and that if he were to breathe it without filters for too long his lungs would quickly fill up with fluid and he would drown. Even through the filters, the reek of ozone and magic create a razor-sharp olfactory icepick to Nate’s brain and he has to swallow hard. It’s bizarrely reassuring to know that the only person who would be witness to Nate throwing up is Billy.

Billy is wearing a new costume patterned with stars and draped with a red cape. It’s very dramatic against the dull red sky, as the cape manages to billow out as he stands on the edge of a crumbling cliff, even when there’s no wind to speak of. His back is to Nate, and he’s gazing down at the wreckage strewn at the foot of the cliff. Nate thinks about looking down to see what Billy sees, but instead his gaze is caught by the sky. He’s able to stare right at the sun, pallid and faded, and it doesn’t hurt his eyes at all. _This is what the dinosaurs saw_ , he thinks. It’s a strange thought, as Nate’s never thought much about the dinosaurs. They had, after all, died so long before his birth.

“What happened here?” Nate says.

At first he doesn’t think that Billy heard him. Then he turns around.

Billy’s eyes are stars, and they make a mockery of the star fields that make up his costume. His hair is the blackness of space and his face, the only skin peeking out from his costume, is so bright it hurts to look at. In this broken, beaten down world Billy is the only light and it is the most terrible thing that Nate has seen.

For a moment, they just stare at one another. Billy’s expression is abstractly curious, without even a flicker of recognition. Nate, on the other hand, is too frightened to take a step backward. He had always known that Billy had _potential_ ; that had been why he had chosen Billy to help fight Kang. A mage was one thing, but Nate had always known that Billy could bend reality to his whims if only he learned how. However, potential isn’t the same thing as seeing it. Nate sees what Billy has become and he thinks _How could we have thought to control this_.

Then Billy turns away to gaze at the wreckage below once more.

“I happened,” he says. There’s a strange, otherworldly edge to his words, much like the way his voice shifted when he was casting magic, only more so. This is the voice of what reality will be, and it’s all the worse for how dreamily serene it sounds. “They came for Teddy and when the Avengers failed, and everyone died, I told them to leave. They won’t come back, not here. I wouldn’t let them fight over him anymore.”

Nate took a breath and held it. “Where is Teddy now?” 

“He died in the first attack,” Billy says, and it’s all the more disturbing how calm he is. “No one knows who shot him, but the Kree and Skrull empires went to war on Earth anyway. I didn’t stop them in time.” He smiles now. “I can fix it though.” 

“How can you fix it?” Nate says, and Billy doesn’t explain further. His gaze goes further away, and he looks more inhuman than he did even a few minutes ago. “Billy!” Nate snaps, and Billy focuses on him, frowning on concentration presumably to focus his will on the here and now. In this moment, he is still human. He is the awkward, nerdy boy that Nate had recruited to save the world from Kang: his hair falls into his normal brown eyes as he bites his lower lip and the corners of his mouth curl in as he tries to hold back tears.

“I can free you before I do it,” he says, and this time his voice is normal, albeit rough with disuse.

“Free me from _what_?”

“Me,” Billy says.

It doesn’t take Nate long to realize what Billy meant. Anyone could have noticed by now that Nate’s travels through time have a tether. No matter how far he travels, how far he skips through time, he’ll always come back to one thing: Billy Kaplan. Nate isn’t sure whether he wants that tether snapped; it’s the last thing holding him to the Young Avengers, and what was the best time of his life.

“It was the CPR, right? Exchanging breath and all that?” Nate snorts. “I knew I should have hoped for Eli to do it.”

“Sorry,” Billy says. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“We never did,” Nate says. “That was the point. We were the _Young_ Avengers. We were supposed to learn and change and defy what everyone thought we’d be.”

“We sure did that,” Billy says, his eyes still human as he gazed on the wreckage. Nate notices that though tears fall from his eyes they disappear before they touch the skin of his cheek and turn to sparks of light and magic. 

“How can you breathe?” Nate asks.

Billy’s smile is a little crooked as he answers. “I’m only human enough now to talk to you.”

Nate makes his choice. He knows that soon Billy will not be able to stop what he has started. Nate’s suit has been screaming warnings at him for a while now about how Billy is channeling more chaos magic than recorded before, and soon that will spill out from under Billy’s skin and change the world. From what he understands, it’s unlikely that Billy will survive the experience, and he certainly wouldn’t survive as Billy Kaplan, the boy who bit his fingernails to the quick when nervous.

Maybe by keeping the tether between them, some part of this Billy may survive. Maybe it’ll be a trade, and the part that dies instead is the part that will make Nate Kang. That would certainly solve all of his problems and prove to everyone that his destiny is escapable.

“I’ll stay,” Nate says. “Keep it tied.”

Billy looks faintly alarmed by this prospect, which is reassuring to Nate. If Billy can be alarmed, there’s still some humanity left, albeit not necessarily a lot. Then he blinks, and there’s very little humanity left in him. 

“No,” Billy says, and it’s like speaking to a god. “It’s time for you to go.” He smiles then, faintly, which does little to make it less terrible. “I really loved being a Young Avenger.”

“No! Billy!” Nate yells as he’s pushed back outside of time. He tries to claw his way back to that moment, or even the moment where he first appeared in that timeline, but it no longer existed. It wasn’t even as if the old timeline had been erased for the new one, but instead that the old one had never existed and therefore wasn’t erased. The differences were subtle but more frightening. He checks, convulsively, to see whether this has had effects on the other parts of the multiverse. Fortunately, it has not: the other Billys he has met are still there. They may not want to help him, but they still exist.

He manages to claw himself back to a few minutes after he was removed from the timeline, which is the closest that he is able to get, and he stares in dismay.

There had never been a war between the Skrull and Kree Empires on Earth. There had never been any empires at all. The surroundings are pristine, never touched by human hands or any other for that matter. The only movement is from tiny green fluffy creatures that squeak “Demiurge!” and point at the sky. 

Nate looks up and his lip curls.

“I hate you so much,” he says bitterly to the star visage of Billy Kaplan. The stars don’t answer. He doesn’t expect them to.

There is no point in staying here. Billy’s solution, born in grief and the uniquely divine madness that can come on reality warpers when pushed too far, does not do much to solve any problem. Teddy is still dead, as are the Avengers, and now that he’s aware of it, Nate can sense the connection between himself and Billy. It’s unquantifiable by science -- as if it were, he would have already known about it -- and that frustrates him further. He’s a being of science and logic, of higher level mathematics and physics, and the idea of him being touched with something as intangible as chaos magic is peculiarly horrifying.

There’s nothing for him here, and he leaves.

*

Nate searches for new dimensions, ones with a Billy that would be agreeable to helping him, where he isn’t about to rewrite an entire world, and one where he’s already dating Teddy. He skips the ones where Billy is a girl as well, and justifies it to himself that a female Billy probably wouldn’t have the same connection to Nate as a male Billy. His internal conscience, who sounds like Cassie, tells him that's not true. He tells it to shut up.

Unfortunately, that narrows the options down considerably. The only ones he’s able to find quickly are the ones where Billy is a demonic lord ruling over Hell on Earth, one where they were all dinosaurs and about twenty dedicated to the New Kree Empire. The last ones made Nate appreciate the _old_ Kree Empires all the more. He doesn’t get the fascination with spiders, bondage wear or singularities, and he really doesn’t like it when they are combined in one hellish package.

He eventually decides that enough is enough, and dials up his Billy’s universe. He’s not quite sure when he started thinking of him as _his_ Billy, but it makes sense that he would. After all, with all the Billys in the universe, each different in subtle and drastic ways, Nate has to designate one of them as his home Billy.

When he emerges into his Billy’s timeline, Billy’s sitting on a bed staring moodily at the wall. He starts on Nate’s appearance, getting to his feet in a hurry. His fingers aren’t splayed though, which Nate takes as a good sign or at the very least not a terrible sign. He’ll take what he can get.

“Hey,” Nate says. “Long time no see.”

“Uh,” Billy says. “Hi?” He looks wary, his hands kept tense by his sides, and Nate rolls his eyes.

“Relax. This is a purely non-evil-me visit.”

“That’s oddly not that reassuring,” Billy says, but then shrugs. Nate's missed the way that he could shrug with a wry self-consciousness that belies the potential that lies beneath. You'd never believe that Billy Kaplan was the fulcrum around which Nate's quest turned or, if he was being honest, around which he turned. “But given that we hang out with Loki now, that can be hard to tell.”

“You do _what_?”

“It’s a really long story,” Billy says with a sigh, the tension draining out with his breath. “Mostly about how I messed up, and brought back Teddy’s dead mom, except now she’s really an evil parasite.”

“That didn’t seem that long,” Nate says. “Also where does Loki fit into it?”

“He tried to kill me to stop me, but I’ve got it under control,” Billy says, as if this makes complete and perfect sense. Nate considers whether he could take on a Norse god masquerading as a nearly powerless twelve year old Asgardian. He decides against it on the grounds that none of that would lead to his ultimate goal.

“You really do attract trouble,” Nate says. “Are you sure you’ve got it under control?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“All right, all right,” Nate says, putting his hands up. “Just wanting to help.” He looks around. “Where’s Teddy?”

Billy shrugs, but he’s always been easy to read when he's not angry, and the mixture of misery of guilt radiates from him. “We’re taking a break. He’s in Austin.”

“ _Texas_?”

“Yeah. Unless there’s another Austin.”

“Fourteen,” Nate says. “But four are in Canada and one in Australia.”

“I can’t believe you _know_ that,” Billy says, sounding faintly awed. Nate doesn’t tell him that he doesn’t; his suit has an interface with Wikipedia and it provides him with a summary. As he scrolls through the results he hopes that Billy doesn’t ask more information, given that some of the results are from abandoned towns.

“So he’s definitely not around,” Nate says, and Billy narrows his eyes in suspicion. 

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Nate isn’t sure what it means either. But he’s been thinking about kissing Billy Kaplan since meeting his female counterpart, or even before that if he’s being honest. Now that he’s as close to being single as Nate has ever seen him, Nate decides: why not? Maybe if he kisses him, gets it out of his system, he can get _Billy_ out of his system.

The kiss wasn’t what he expected it would be. He’s not sure what he expected. Passive acceptance, maybe. Instead, Billy fights back and pushes Nate away. Nate just stands there. with it dawning on him exactly how much of a terrible idea this was.

“What was _that_?” Billy says, sounding pissed.

“A bad idea,” Nate says, because it is.

“That wasn’t _permission_!” Billy snaps. “Just because we’re taking a break doesn’t mean we’re not _together_.”

“I know,” Nate says.

“So what the hell was _that_ about?” Billy’s scowling furiously and his arms are folded.

“I’ve just always wanted to do that,” Nate says.

“Oh, so it’s about you. You can’t just do that! You can’t just turn up here after disappearing for a year, after _destroying the Vision_ , and - and - you can’t just _kiss_ me like that!” Billy’s scarlet by the end, though whether that’s from anger or embarrassment is anyone’s guess.

“Yeah, I know. I messed up with the Vision.”

“That’s an understatement,” Billy says. He’s still scowling. “And I’m not going to help you bring Cassie back.”

“I’m not going to ask you,” Nate says and is satisfied when Billy drops the hostile attitude and just stares at him. “I already know I can’t save her. A version of you sealed her timeline from me.”

“Well — good,” Billy says. He chews on his bottom lip before adding, “One of us needs to not make that mistake.”

“I still don’t think you meant to do that,” Nate says, more to himself. He doesn’t have Billy’s blinkers when it comes to Norse mythology and to him, Loki is nothing more than a very talented and sadistic alien with a gift for creating discord wherever he goes.

“No, I did,” Billy says with utmost conviction, which Nate finds especially odd, but he decides not to interfere this time. After all, Billy did say he had it under control, and Nate’s made enough of a mess of things already.

“Look,” Nate says. “I didn’t come here just to kiss you.”

“I figured that,” Billy says. He doesn’t say _and you shouldn’t have_ , but judging by the tension in his folded arms it’s not necessary to be said.

“I need your help.”

Billy blinks. “Is this a Kang thing? We don’t do well with Kang things.”

“No. It’s a me thing.”

“Those are the same thing,” Billy says, but by the way he looks away, it’s clear that he doesn’t really believe that. Nate knows that Billy doesn’t believe it, otherwise he wouldn’t have tried to stop Nate from leaving to save Cassie.

“They don’t _have_ to be, and you know it. That’s why I’m here. I need you to help me.”

“What do you need me to do?” Billy says.

“I need you to use your magic and make me not Kang.”

Billy stares at him for a moment. “I can’t do that,” he says. “I - I wouldn’t know _how_.”

“Billy,” Nate says. “I saw you with the powers of a _god_. You can do this.”

Billy makes a face. “Please tell me that there is only one world where that happens, because I don’t think I could take a second.”

“I’ve only run into the one,” Nate says. 

“That’s … less bad,” Billy says. “But I can’t do that, Nate. The only way I could do that is to make you not … _you_.”

“That’s not true. You can do _anything_. Surely you can do this.”

Billy shrugs awkwardly and doesn’t quite look at Nate. “I can’t. It’s like I told you before. You become Kang by your own choices. When you decided to use time travel to save Cassie that makes you more Kang.”

“Come _on_ ,” Nate says. “You’re a reality warper. Just make it so that I don’t become Kang.”

“I _can’t_ ,” Billy says. “Only _you_ can do that.”

“I can’t believe you won’t help me,” Nate says.

“I can’t believe you won’t _listen_ ,” Billy says. “This is why the Vision was a better you than you were.”

The words hurt like a gut punch, and judging from Billy’s shocked expression he knows that it hurts like one too.

“I didn’t — I — _I’m sorry_ ,” Billy manages to get out. 

Nate resolves the issue by storming off to the twenty-fifth century to fume. It’s not like he doesn’t have an eternity to sulk in before he has to return.

The worst part is that in his travels, he’s come to realize that the Vision is, in fact, a better version of himself, and he does understand why. The Vision focused on the here and now, staying in one time and place and furthering the connections he had with others. 

However, that’s not an option for Nate. There isn’t anyone in his own time that cares about him, not in the way that he wants them to. There’s no other time point to go into to stay either, because _everyone_ has heard of Kang the Conqueror, or a variant thereof. It’s a catch-22 situation.

Further, he will always be forced into becoming Kang. It’s something that he’s learned during his time travels. Someone will always push him into accepting that fate, and no one will tell him what it is that he needs to do. That is, no one except Billy.

This is what baffles Nate. He can admit that he has been somewhat fixated on Billy. If Billy is aware of what his alternate selves do -- and Nate suspects he might at a subconscious level, given how much Billy’s powers are evolving and changing -- then he would know exactly how much Nate has been revolving around the star that is Billy Kaplan. 

He’s also been thinking about what Willa Maximoff told him. If he’s looking in the wrong place, where’s the right one? 

For not the first time, Nate curses that he is all tangled up with these magic users, and sets his course for another time.

*

His technology breaks in transit, and there’s barely enough power to send him back to his home time point. Nate resents that he has to return to his home time, because it’s never been an era that appreciated him. To be fair, the others before it didn’t either, but that was because Kang was a terrible person as opposed to Nathaniel Richards being good at science.

His investigations in his workshop reveal that the temporal dilator is broken, probably because of how long it’s been since he’s had time to do a proper service on all the parts. He knows better than this, knows that his tools are only as good as he maintains them to be, but he’s been driven for so long to fix what has gone so terribly wrong. It figures that he has been let down by external forces in his life. After all, what was Kang, but an external force?

The repairs will take time, which he has, and patience, which he doesn’t have. He instructs the technical drone on what needs to be done, and then heads out to get some coffee to clear his head. He’s not sure why he wants to do this, as there’s a perfectly serviceable coffee maker inside his workshop, but there’s something pulling on him to go outside.

New York in the thirtieth century aspires to be like New York of the twenty-first century. Nate used to like the ambience, if not the people, until he travelled to New York of the twenty-first century and realized just how much of a shallow copy it is. While there are skyscrapers and cafes and little alleyways, it’s all carefully constructed, with interfaces on every street corner keeping every citizen connected to the worldwide neural network. It’s far too clean and bright to be New York, not the real New York that Nate remembers and longs to return to.

Nate’s interface has been corrupted during his travels, and while he can access the network to access his bank accounts, he’s not able to access the weather channel, and so is caught in the rainstorm designed to wash the streets clear.

“Ugh,” he says, and fumbles in his pockets for his rain shield. It’s not there, and Nate remembers with a groan that he had emptied his pockets out before he left to make sure he wasn’t carrying any weapons into Starbucks. He resigns himself to the knowledge that he will be very wet, and probably get very sick, as a result of this ill-conceived expedition.

A shield snaps up above him, shielding him from the rain, and Nate glances at his mysterious benefactor to find out what he owes them for it. Then he stares.

“Hi Nate,” Billy says. He’s older now, a little taller, and a little broader across the shoulders. The goatee is new, as is the hairstyle, which is cropped short on the sides. The clothes are contemporary as well, and the way that Billy uses the shield suggests that he’s familiar with the technology.

“What — what _is_ this?” Nate says.

“Rain,” Billy says with a grin. “You might have seen it from time to time.”

“I mean _you_. What are you _doing_ here?”

“I’ve been here for two years.”

This brings Nate up short, because Billy was meant to die hundreds of years before Nate was born and not show up in _his_ time, being just as acclimatized to it as Nate was. It’s something that Nate tries not to think about, because the idea of people dying in ways that he couldn’t stop, people leaving him, is too frustrating to bear. As such, he’d never looked into the precise ways and dates that his friends died, instead assuming that it would be of old age at the age of a hundred and fifty. 

He looks now. Eli dies at eighty, peacefully, with his wife by his side and his children and grandchildren in attendance outside. Kate dies a few years after her husband, Tommy, and their deaths are also peaceful and well attended. Teddy’s funeral brings about a peace treaty between the Kree and Skrull Empires and his children, with Teddy’s smile and Billy’s quick, clever eyes, end up leading the empires to new heights of prosperity. Cassie remains dead at fourteen, and this hurts still.

Billy never dies. In fact, after Teddy’s death at ninety, Billy simply disappears.

“I don’t understand.” Nate hates not understanding.

“I rewrote how magic worked,” Billy says. He doesn’t look like he’s eighty-nine. He doesn’t look a day over twenty. “So now there has to be a Billy Kaplan in the timeline. And,” he says with a quick smile. “I chose this time to be my next anchor, because I have a friend here, one who’d understand the multiplicity of my existence.”

“What?” Nate says. “You mean like how there’s different versions of me.”

“Yeah,” Billy says. “Every version of me you met, I remember because I was them.”

“Are you really eighty-nine?” Nate says, deciding to think about the potential consequences of that particular revelation at a later stage. Preferably when he’s sitting down.

Billy snorts. “No. I’m twenty.”

“Oh,” Nate says. “You said anchor.”

“Yeah,” Billy says with a wry shrug. “To keep magic working the way it should, I need to be in certain points in time. I kept waiting for you to turn up but you were in every time but this one.” He sounds tentatively hopeful when he adds, “Do you think you’ll stay?”

In one timeline Nate refuses. He becomes Kang the Conqueror, as he is destined to become, as he tried desperately to not become. He rages against Billy Kaplan for not saving him, and eventually this becomes raging at the Avengers simply because they are the Avengers. 

In this one he agrees. “Yeah. I’ll stay.”

And with that, everything shifts. A Nathanial Richards who does not travel in time cannot become Kang. Nate realizes this as he feels the weight of destiny shift off his shoulders and fall away, and he’s free for the first time in a very long time. He is still bound to Billy, but that is no difficult thing to live with now, not with the weight of Kang gone from him.

“I knew you’d do it in time,” Billy says.

Nate grins in triumph at Billy, and they walk home together under his rain shield.


End file.
